I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.

There’s nothing like being handed a tiny human being for whom you are utterly responsible to make you realize how small we all really are. (Particularly for those of us who can’t manage not to kill houseplants, this feeling is staggering.) We feel inadequate, overwhelmed, overjoyed, and exhausted by turns. Nothing is trivial, everything feels huge, and probably will for a while. (I haven’t seen a finish line around here anywhere, so if you spot one, please speak up.)

Someday, though, we have to pass the torch. We stop being their heroes and start being their opponents. I’m not looking forward to the teen years, when the parent/child relationship becomes way more complicated and sometimes much more antagonistic. I’m not looking forward to being my kid’s version of the Evil Queen. It makes me think differently about the wicked stepmother and the evil fairy godmother. What if the difference between being the hero of the story, and the villain, is just where you stop telling it?

What if Rapunzel’s captor knew she had been promised in an arranged marriage at birth to a wealthy but cruel man?

What if the slighted fairy godmother in Sleeping Beauty foresaw a terrible plague would come to the kingdom, and she cursed Brier Rose so she would not suffer through it?

What if Goldilocks had been lost in the woods for days and couldn’t find her way home?

What if we never came to understand how scary our teen years must have been for our parents? What if we never forgave them for not always handling those years with grace?

What if we let these years of tumult and noise and dirt and drama be our fairy tales? If we spin them into the folklore of our families and hand them down. My kid is very literal. There’s good guys and bad guys, and if you’re not a good guy, you’re a bad guy. But growing up and making our way in the world requires us to grasp that sometimes we are one (no more cake, it’s too close to dinner) and sometimes we’re the other (15 more minutes of TV before bed is ok.) and sometimes we are both. It all depends on where you stand and when you stop telling the story. How do we teach kids to navigate nuance and perspective?

I personally have no idea, but I think I’ll start by reading them fairy tales. (The Lego version won’t be far behind, because “there is a book, a movie, a play, and a Lego version of EVERYTHING,” according to my six year old marketing expert.)

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